The biggest thing I see is that there is now a fundamental disincentive to ever really 'fix' Windows.
When the AV products aren't from your own company, there's pressure to remove them as competitors. When the AV division is part of your own company, there's not much incentive to put your coworkers out of jobs. And management is unlikely to want to squash an ongoing revenue stream.
Microsoft has desperately wanted the subscription model for many years. This, essentially, is it. They get to charge you fifty bucks a year. If they get a significant chunk of the userbase signed up, that is a HUGE amount of money. They're NOT going to jeopardize this new revenue stream by making the platform fundamentally virus-resistant in any meaningful way.
In fact, they now have a big incentive to make the OS less secure.
Crap, I hit submit too soon. The last thing I wanted to say was... hopefully whoever picks up Delphi and Kylix will have a clue and know what to do with them. I'd like to see something *like* Kylix, but married intimately into XWindows and KDE or GNOME, and able to product standalone executables. Or, at the very least, they should have utilities to create tarballs with all the necessary files.
But after having been burned that bad on Kylix, it'll take some seriously strong recommendations, and probably a good long time with a demo copy, for me to send any more money down that rathole.
I absolutely loved the early versions of Delphi. The manuals that came with it were long, involved, and brilliant. It was like being taken on a tour of what programming should really be like by about ten of the smartest guys in the business. Writing Object Pascal felt, much of the time, like writing poetry. The component library was clean and beautifully laid out. The IDE was super-responsive. And it could compile code faster than anything on the planet at the time. Back in the days of the 486, compile time really mattered, and being able to do 10,000 lines per minute on a 486-33 was extremely impressive. (hopefully I'm remembering my numbers correctly, it HAS been a very long time... it might have even been 100,000, but that seems too fast for a 486. Whatever the actual number was, it was, god, twenty times faster than anything else.) And a compiled Delphi program was just one EXE. No DLLs, no runtime, no dependencies, no distribution headaches... one EXE you could dump on a floppy and hand to someone. And the code was lightning-quick.
But then it started going in a strange direction... after Delphi 3, they decided to focus totally on database programming, and they ignored most of the other good stuff. And somewhere in that time frame, Microsoft swooped in and bought Anders Hejlsberg, the real brain behind Delphi. They correctly identified him as THE guy at Borland, and paid him a cool million in hard cash, upfront, to come to work for them. We are seeing the final results of losing Anders now. Without him at the technical helm, Borland entered into a long, slow decline. Delphi went off the rails, they forgot what was really great about it... it turned into a bloated mass of crud, focused on a tiny subset of the full universe of programming.
And then there was Kylix, which was an abortion if I ever saw one... what a horrible piece of software. I coughed up $1200 for the first Pro version because I was excited to see Delphi on Linux.... except it really wasn't. It looked like Delphi, but it didn't feel like it. It was still fundamentally a Windows program, with the minimum amount of effort needed to port things. Distributing a Kylix app was freaking impossible if you didn't already understand the Linux library system very intimately. There was nothing at all like the 'single-exe' feature, even though they made claims about 'easy distribution' on the box. And the documentation was terrible, just incredibly bad.
Seeing Borland die at this point would be more of a relief than anything; they have become a clueless company and haven't got a prayer of long-term survival. They have pissed all over everything they've ever done. You'd have to be an idiot to choose their software these days, between the freeware and the commercial alternatives.
For Microsoft, hiring Anders was a brilliant move; destroy a competitor for just one million dollars, pocket change from their standpoint. Anders worked on language recognition for awhile, but eventually he went back into compiler technology. He's the main brain behind this little language you might have heard of, C#.....
It's a semi-famous psychological experiment. I don't remember who ran it. Basically, you try not to think of a white bear for five minutes. Doesn't work... you'll think of white bears more than you probably ever have in your life.:)
I'm gonna reply a second time, just because this is soooo dumb.
You do realize that US Federal Bonds aren't money, right? They're a promise to pay money, someday, by the US government.
So by taking the Social Security money and using it to 'buy bonds', the government is taking cash, for which it's exchanging the promise to repay the money someday. That's called an IOU... they're promising to pay themselves. It's _exactly_ like finding your wife's IOUs in the piggy bank. The money has to come from somewhere.
Worse, the IOUs they stick Social Security with are special bonds that they can't resell on the open market. They could get a LOT better interest rate if they were able to keep the money and invest it wisely... US bonds are very low-interest. But they're stuck with the special low-interest notes that they can't do anything with. By any reasonable standard, they're worth far less than real bonds would be.
So you, the taxpayer, are getting REAMED, and apparently you're very happy about it.
Yes, you will be repaid for your Treasury Bonds. They're very safe, in the sense that you'll get back exactly what the government promises.... dollars. Dollars, I should point out, backed by ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. So they can print dollars wildly. This results in inflation.
You'll be paid back, but you'll be repaid in currency that is worth A LOT less than what it is now. The US Government owes too much money to too many people to EVER pay them all back in dollars of equal value. Ever. Can't happen. So they'll dilute the dollars until they CAN be repaid. This dilution process will mean that people will bail out of dollars, depressing them still more.
We have been the world's reserve currency since Bretton Woods, and we are in the final stages of abusing that privilege. When the dollar is no longer the world's reserve currency, the US will no longer be the pre-eminent power.
This is one of history's deepest lessons: a stable currency makes a stable country. Countries that fuck with their currencies, over the long haul, die. The only reason we haven't, yet, is because we were both the world's reserve currency and the world's wealthiest country. Neither will last.
And don't make the mistake of projecting the last 60 years to be how it will be forever.... we didn't truly go off the gold standard until 1971, although we'd been abusing it prior to that. (mostly with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society stuff... we couldn't pay for that and the Vietnam War too.) That means the world didn't go off the gold standard until then, either, because we are the reserve currency.
It is not a coincidence that there have been so many small countries that have had monetary crises since, and it's not a coincidence that our own goverment is in a fiscal death spiral. We've done pretty well by the standards of fiat currency, but in the end it will destroy us as a world power, exactly as debased currency has wrecked all the others that have embraced the idea.
This is absolutely correct. I wish I had mod points right now.
Another way of looking at it is this: you have a kid and spend 18 years saving up for her college education, putting the money in a (big) piggy bank. Your wife, without you knowing, takes the money out of the piggy bank, substitutes IOUs, and spends the money. Well, come age 18, you go to open the cookie jar, and find... lots of IOUs.
That's exactly what the Clinton 'surplus' was. He stole the Social Security money and substituted IOUs, running up an enormous future debt to make himself look better.
Bush has continued that bullshit game, but now the government finances are so unbelievably messed up that no degree of bullshit accounting can make up for it. We're in FAR worse shape than we think we are. The United States, like all other empires before it, is failing from adventurism and total lack of fiscal discipline. We've written big, BIG checks that we cannot cash.
I think Bush and his cronies know this, and they are simply looting as much as they can before the final collapse. And that's not that far off... possibly within 10 years, certainly within 20.
There will still be a "United States of America", but it won't be the same government, and it's likely to be a very unpleasant place to live.
LOL! I wrestled a bit with which of the two words to use, and thought deucedly was a bit more amusing. And, with your comment, that turned out to be correct.:)
It's worth pointing out that, at the time the first consumer hard drives shipped, phones weren't quite as advanced either. The smallest phones I knew about, for a long time, were the Princess models. But then Congress passed laws allowing you to plug anything you liked into a phone jack. (at one time, it was illegal to plug in anything that Ma Bell hadn't pre-approved, and they didn't seem to approve much of other companies muscling in on their handset business.) This resulted in a great deal of innovation in the phone market.
So in the mid to late 80s, when hard drives were getting popular in the consumer market, you could finally buy a phone that was small enough to fit in a pocket. This wasn't quite as popular as you might think, however, since a cord dangling out of your pants was deucedly uncomfortable.
Personally, I'd LOVE a GNU/Solaris distro.... the Solaris kernels are extremely robust. I've had very bad luck with Linux all through the 2.6 series. Even the stable versions have had constant security patches, requiring reboots and downtime. I hate downtime.
FreeBSD with the GNU utilities is one possible replacement, but it'd be nice to have a kernel that's both extremely robust AND scalable at the center. FreeBSD is very solid, but it doesn't (yet) scale like Solaris does. Linux scales, but it's not stable. Solaris does both things at once, which makes it very attractive. So a distro that combined a Solaris kernel with a well-integrated GNU userland would be very interesting to me. (bonus points for good documentation... coming from Linux, Solaris can be downright Byzantine in comparison.) Learn the system once, and use it for everything from a desktop to a SunFire.
I imagine the hardware support would be horrible at first, but it wouldn't shock me to see it improve very, very rapidly once it was set free. And I'd happily support it with some dollars here and there. I've spent a great deal of money on Linux over the years, and if Solaris met my needs better, I'd be happy to pony up there too. (just in small amounts... not thousands per server!:) )
The biggest reason I haven't used Solaris X86 is because I haven't had any available systems with compatible hardware. GPLing it would, I think, fix that problem in short order....
The 500 didn't come out until '87, just a shade under two years after the A1000. It was a superb machine, lightyears past anything else on the market, but both the A1000 and the A500 came well after the first Macs.
Since I can't be proven wrong, I'll probably continue to assert for the remainder of my life that, had Apple's marketing and research muscle been behind the Amiga's hardware, the PC would have died by the early to mid 90s. Fortunately for Microsoft, Commodore's management was dumber 'n a box of rocks, and pissed away a machine that was, absolutely literally, eight to ten years ahead of everyone else.
Whether or not you think it's handwaving, that's how orbital mechanics works.:) I'm no great shakes with it, I can't do the MATH or anything, but I do know, approximately, how orbits work.
The closer an orbit is, the faster an object must travel to maintain position. This is measured in angular velocity. Linear velocity may or may not be faster (I honestly don't know the answer to this offhand), but angular velocity needs to be.
Why? Because the closer you are to an object, the stronger the force of gravity is, and the faster you're accelerated toward that body. Orbiting, to steal a phrase from Douglas Adams, is plummeting headlong at the ground...and missing. A falling body, if it happens to move exactly far enough to one side to counteract the downward fall, ends up in a circular path around the larger object.
So: the closer you are, the faster you are accelerated. The faster you fall, the faster you have to move sideways.
This has all kinds of interesting side effects. For instance, if you are orbiting a body and you want to move closer to it, you need to slow down. You then fall more than you did before. The body accelerates you, and you gain angular velocity. You end up in a lower, faster orbit. (assuming you don't actually hit the body). To move into a higher orbit, you speed up... you move further out, and slow down. Yes, you slow down to speed up, and you speed up to slow down. Probably, this is explained by converting linear into angular velocity, but again, I'm not too up on the actual math.
Two different orbits might be able to have the same linear velocity. It doesn't directly matter. For determining a stable orbit, only angular velocity counts.
Ok, so looking again at the original problem. We have an object directly behind the sun from the point of view of the Earth; the Sun is directly between the two bodies. Both bodies are orbiting. There are three possibilities:
A) The object is closer to the Sun than the Earth is. Because it is being accelerated more quickly, it must have more angular velocity to avoid being captured by the Sun. It cannot remain directly behind the Sun, and will eventually become visible. B) The object is further away from the Sun than the Earth is. To avoid flying off into the deep dark, it have less angular velocity than the Earth. It, too, cannot stay in place, and will become visible. C) The object is at exactly the same distance. This allows it to move at exactly the same speed the Earth moves; it can remain hidden as long as it can maintain that orbit. This is the ONLY scenario that will work, unless you assume a propulsion system of some type.
If, after all this, you still don't believe me, go find an online orrery... a model of the Solar System. Just watch the orbits for about three minutes and you will be convinced. Mercury moves VERY FAST. (in terms of angular velocity). Venus moves faster than Earth. Mars moves slower than Earth. You can directly calculate the orbital time by the distance from the Sun, though I don't have the formula handy. The farther out it is, the slower the stable orbit is.
It's entirely possible that all orbits of a given body have the same linear velocity, but I have no direct knowledge of that, and no way to easily prove it. In just thinking about it a minute or two... if that WAS true, it might apply only to perfectly circular orbits. Highly elliptical orbits are very fast at their near points and very slow at their far points. Perhaps the _average_ linear momentum is always the same?
Hopefully, someone with the math will chime in. I know this isn't very hard, and I'm a bit ashamed that I don't remember it anymore.
Ah, cool, I hadn't thought about that... the resyncs in RAID10 are faster too... another win.
I knew the RAID5 stuff, but that wasn't really that relevant to a RAID0+1 vs. RAID10 comparison. "Slower but you lose less space" seemed like a pretty fair compromise for one sentence.:)
Note also that if you have a GOOD RAID5 controller, it'll work at pretty much the full speed of the spindles anyway. Controllers that good are often several grand, but they do exist. As an example, I have an old ICP Vortex 32-bit PCI controller. If I recall correctly, it benched writing about 60 megs/second, running RAID5 across six disks on two channels. The response time in normal usage is lightning-quick. It can take one hell of a beating.
Newer cards would be faster still, though you'll generally need better than vanilla PCI to support them.
I have an 8500-series 3Ware card, and it really doesn't perform well under load. If the array is under heavy write I/O, the entire machine drags to a near-halt. It's very frustrating. I ended up using the fairly expensive card as a JBOD controller, and using software RAID instead. On an Athlon 1900+, it's MUCH faster in software. I'd really prefer hardware RAID, but it's just too damn slow.
The 9XXX series are supposedly better, but reviews I've read suggest that they're still pretty underpowered for heavy writes.
Out of 8 disks, the chance of losing two at once is higher than you'd think, especially if he's using the cheaper SATA drives. I lost 2 drives out of a RAID5 in short succession just recently, and *just barely* managed to save the most recent data before the second drive died too.
RAID 0+1 is much inferior to RAID10. 0+1 is what the GP poster said... stripe 4 disks in RAID-0, and mirror those. You're no more fault tolerant than a RAID5 array.. if ANY two drives fail, you're hosed. You lose 50% of the space to boot. (in RAID5, on 8 disks, you'd lose only 12.5%, though of course it's slower.)
RAID10, on the other hand, is setting up four mirrors, and striping the mirrors. You still lose 50% of your space. However, you lose the whole array only if both 'sibling' drives in a given mirror fail. That means you have a pretty good chance of surviving a multi-drive failure. And it's very fast....just as fast as 0+1, but it's a lot more robust. Of course, both are very inefficient in terms of space lost, but drives are so cheap these days that it doesn't matter too much.
Any good controller will do RAID10 nowadays... only the very cheapest/crappiest controllers are limited to the inferior 0+1.
I'm almost sure that's wrong. Under the first sale doctrine, you have the right to sell the original CD you buy. Under fair use, you have the right to move your music from one medium to another for your own personal enjoyment.
Under copyright law, however, you do NOT have the right to transfer the copy. Whether the copy was legal when you made it or not is irrelevant. It is the transfer that is illegal. Only the copyright holder can authorize that.
You can sell the CD only because first sale overrides copyright, and only for that specific, original CD. If you backed up your CD, damaged it, and then recreated it from your backup, you would not have the right to transfer the backup. Only the original thing you bought can be resold.
50 concurrent users is a LOT. You may not really mean concurrent, as in "50 people actually reading from or writing to this drive at the same time". If you DO mean that, you desperately need SCSI, the fastest you can find. You'll need seek time more than anything else; the drives need to respond as fast as possible to multiplexed requests for data. Rotation speed, which improves seek time and transfer rate, is good too, but it's seek time that's most crucial in heavy multitasking environments. If by 'concurrent' you mean '50 people occasionally hitting the disk', then yeah, you could probably do SATA.
However, you already have SCSI. Management is used to paying for SCSI machines. If you have 50-100 people depending on something, and it's slow, that's a productivity drag. If you assume that all those people cost $100k/year each (not at all unreasonable with benefits), 50 people are getting paid about 2,500 bucks an hour, or about 20,000 dollars a day. In other words, if you speed them up by just 5% with better hardware, you're saving the company a thousand dollars a day. Even if it's a tiny 1% speed gain, that's still 200 bucks a day. Saving six grand a month for an upfront investment of ten grand is a total no brainer.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot:
D) Let everyone know that you're out of the closet.
The biggest thing I see is that there is now a fundamental disincentive to ever really 'fix' Windows.
When the AV products aren't from your own company, there's pressure to remove them as competitors. When the AV division is part of your own company, there's not much incentive to put your coworkers out of jobs. And management is unlikely to want to squash an ongoing revenue stream.
Microsoft has desperately wanted the subscription model for many years. This, essentially, is it. They get to charge you fifty bucks a year. If they get a significant chunk of the userbase signed up, that is a HUGE amount of money. They're NOT going to jeopardize this new revenue stream by making the platform fundamentally virus-resistant in any meaningful way.
In fact, they now have a big incentive to make the OS less secure.
Crap, I hit submit too soon. The last thing I wanted to say was... hopefully whoever picks up Delphi and Kylix will have a clue and know what to do with them. I'd like to see something *like* Kylix, but married intimately into XWindows and KDE or GNOME, and able to product standalone executables. Or, at the very least, they should have utilities to create tarballs with all the necessary files.
But after having been burned that bad on Kylix, it'll take some seriously strong recommendations, and probably a good long time with a demo copy, for me to send any more money down that rathole.
I absolutely loved the early versions of Delphi. The manuals that came with it were long, involved, and brilliant. It was like being taken on a tour of what programming should really be like by about ten of the smartest guys in the business. Writing Object Pascal felt, much of the time, like writing poetry. The component library was clean and beautifully laid out. The IDE was super-responsive. And it could compile code faster than anything on the planet at the time. Back in the days of the 486, compile time really mattered, and being able to do 10,000 lines per minute on a 486-33 was extremely impressive. (hopefully I'm remembering my numbers correctly, it HAS been a very long time... it might have even been 100,000, but that seems too fast for a 486. Whatever the actual number was, it was, god, twenty times faster than anything else.) And a compiled Delphi program was just one EXE. No DLLs, no runtime, no dependencies, no distribution headaches... one EXE you could dump on a floppy and hand to someone. And the code was lightning-quick.
But then it started going in a strange direction... after Delphi 3, they decided to focus totally on database programming, and they ignored most of the other good stuff. And somewhere in that time frame, Microsoft swooped in and bought Anders Hejlsberg, the real brain behind Delphi. They correctly identified him as THE guy at Borland, and paid him a cool million in hard cash, upfront, to come to work for them. We are seeing the final results of losing Anders now. Without him at the technical helm, Borland entered into a long, slow decline. Delphi went off the rails, they forgot what was really great about it... it turned into a bloated mass of crud, focused on a tiny subset of the full universe of programming.
And then there was Kylix, which was an abortion if I ever saw one... what a horrible piece of software. I coughed up $1200 for the first Pro version because I was excited to see Delphi on Linux.... except it really wasn't. It looked like Delphi, but it didn't feel like it. It was still fundamentally a Windows program, with the minimum amount of effort needed to port things. Distributing a Kylix app was freaking impossible if you didn't already understand the Linux library system very intimately. There was nothing at all like the 'single-exe' feature, even though they made claims about 'easy distribution' on the box. And the documentation was terrible, just incredibly bad.
Seeing Borland die at this point would be more of a relief than anything; they have become a clueless company and haven't got a prayer of long-term survival. They have pissed all over everything they've ever done. You'd have to be an idiot to choose their software these days, between the freeware and the commercial alternatives.
For Microsoft, hiring Anders was a brilliant move; destroy a competitor for just one million dollars, pocket change from their standpoint. Anders worked on language recognition for awhile, but eventually he went back into compiler technology. He's the main brain behind this little language you might have heard of, C#.....
It's a semi-famous psychological experiment. I don't remember who ran it. Basically, you try not to think of a white bear for five minutes. Doesn't work... you'll think of white bears more than you probably ever have in your life. :)
While you're at it, don't think of a white bear.
I'm gonna reply a second time, just because this is soooo dumb.
You do realize that US Federal Bonds aren't money, right? They're a promise to pay money, someday, by the US government.
So by taking the Social Security money and using it to 'buy bonds', the government is taking cash, for which it's exchanging the promise to repay the money someday. That's called an IOU... they're promising to pay themselves. It's _exactly_ like finding your wife's IOUs in the piggy bank. The money has to come from somewhere.
Worse, the IOUs they stick Social Security with are special bonds that they can't resell on the open market. They could get a LOT better interest rate if they were able to keep the money and invest it wisely... US bonds are very low-interest. But they're stuck with the special low-interest notes that they can't do anything with. By any reasonable standard, they're worth far less than real bonds would be.
So you, the taxpayer, are getting REAMED, and apparently you're very happy about it.
Well, assuming that this is real and works (I have no idea), it might be to create interference, so the phones go into high-power mode?
1. World of Warcraft.
<end of list>
You just don't have any clue.
Yes, you will be repaid for your Treasury Bonds. They're very safe, in the sense that you'll get back exactly what the government promises.... dollars. Dollars, I should point out, backed by ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. So they can print dollars wildly. This results in inflation.
You'll be paid back, but you'll be repaid in currency that is worth A LOT less than what it is now. The US Government owes too much money to too many people to EVER pay them all back in dollars of equal value. Ever. Can't happen. So they'll dilute the dollars until they CAN be repaid. This dilution process will mean that people will bail out of dollars, depressing them still more.
We have been the world's reserve currency since Bretton Woods, and we are in the final stages of abusing that privilege. When the dollar is no longer the world's reserve currency, the US will no longer be the pre-eminent power.
This is one of history's deepest lessons: a stable currency makes a stable country. Countries that fuck with their currencies, over the long haul, die. The only reason we haven't, yet, is because we were both the world's reserve currency and the world's wealthiest country. Neither will last.
And don't make the mistake of projecting the last 60 years to be how it will be forever.... we didn't truly go off the gold standard until 1971, although we'd been abusing it prior to that. (mostly with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society stuff... we couldn't pay for that and the Vietnam War too.) That means the world didn't go off the gold standard until then, either, because we are the reserve currency.
It is not a coincidence that there have been so many small countries that have had monetary crises since, and it's not a coincidence that our own goverment is in a fiscal death spiral. We've done pretty well by the standards of fiat currency, but in the end it will destroy us as a world power, exactly as debased currency has wrecked all the others that have embraced the idea.
This is absolutely correct. I wish I had mod points right now.
... lots of IOUs.
Another way of looking at it is this: you have a kid and spend 18 years saving up for her college education, putting the money in a (big) piggy bank. Your wife, without you knowing, takes the money out of the piggy bank, substitutes IOUs, and spends the money. Well, come age 18, you go to open the cookie jar, and find
That's exactly what the Clinton 'surplus' was. He stole the Social Security money and substituted IOUs, running up an enormous future debt to make himself look better.
Bush has continued that bullshit game, but now the government finances are so unbelievably messed up that no degree of bullshit accounting can make up for it. We're in FAR worse shape than we think we are. The United States, like all other empires before it, is failing from adventurism and total lack of fiscal discipline. We've written big, BIG checks that we cannot cash.
I think Bush and his cronies know this, and they are simply looting as much as they can before the final collapse. And that's not that far off... possibly within 10 years, certainly within 20.
There will still be a "United States of America", but it won't be the same government, and it's likely to be a very unpleasant place to live.
LOL! I wrestled a bit with which of the two words to use, and thought deucedly was a bit more amusing. And, with your comment, that turned out to be correct. :)
It's worth pointing out that, at the time the first consumer hard drives shipped, phones weren't quite as advanced either. The smallest phones I knew about, for a long time, were the Princess models. But then Congress passed laws allowing you to plug anything you liked into a phone jack. (at one time, it was illegal to plug in anything that Ma Bell hadn't pre-approved, and they didn't seem to approve much of other companies muscling in on their handset business.) This resulted in a great deal of innovation in the phone market.
So in the mid to late 80s, when hard drives were getting popular in the consumer market, you could finally buy a phone that was small enough to fit in a pocket. This wasn't quite as popular as you might think, however, since a cord dangling out of your pants was deucedly uncomfortable.
</grandpa>
Personally, I'd LOVE a GNU/Solaris distro.... the Solaris kernels are extremely robust. I've had very bad luck with Linux all through the 2.6 series. Even the stable versions have had constant security patches, requiring reboots and downtime. I hate downtime.
:) )
FreeBSD with the GNU utilities is one possible replacement, but it'd be nice to have a kernel that's both extremely robust AND scalable at the center. FreeBSD is very solid, but it doesn't (yet) scale like Solaris does. Linux scales, but it's not stable. Solaris does both things at once, which makes it very attractive. So a distro that combined a Solaris kernel with a well-integrated GNU userland would be very interesting to me. (bonus points for good documentation... coming from Linux, Solaris can be downright Byzantine in comparison.) Learn the system once, and use it for everything from a desktop to a SunFire.
I imagine the hardware support would be horrible at first, but it wouldn't shock me to see it improve very, very rapidly once it was set free. And I'd happily support it with some dollars here and there. I've spent a great deal of money on Linux over the years, and if Solaris met my needs better, I'd be happy to pony up there too. (just in small amounts... not thousands per server!
The biggest reason I haven't used Solaris X86 is because I haven't had any available systems with compatible hardware. GPLing it would, I think, fix that problem in short order....
. money much made have would it think don't I but , interesting been have would Forth about Story Toy A .
Um, how do you know?
The 500 didn't come out until '87, just a shade under two years after the A1000. It was a superb machine, lightyears past anything else on the market, but both the A1000 and the A500 came well after the first Macs.
Since I can't be proven wrong, I'll probably continue to assert for the remainder of my life that, had Apple's marketing and research muscle been behind the Amiga's hardware, the PC would have died by the early to mid 90s. Fortunately for Microsoft, Commodore's management was dumber 'n a box of rocks, and pissed away a machine that was, absolutely literally, eight to ten years ahead of everyone else.
Whether or not you think it's handwaving, that's how orbital mechanics works. :) I'm no great shakes with it, I can't do the MATH or anything, but I do know, approximately, how orbits work.
The closer an orbit is, the faster an object must travel to maintain position. This is measured in angular velocity. Linear velocity may or may not be faster (I honestly don't know the answer to this offhand), but angular velocity needs to be.
Why? Because the closer you are to an object, the stronger the force of gravity is, and the faster you're accelerated toward that body. Orbiting, to steal a phrase from Douglas Adams, is plummeting headlong at the ground...and missing. A falling body, if it happens to move exactly far enough to one side to counteract the downward fall, ends up in a circular path around the larger object.
So: the closer you are, the faster you are accelerated. The faster you fall, the faster you have to move sideways.
This has all kinds of interesting side effects. For instance, if you are orbiting a body and you want to move closer to it, you need to slow down. You then fall more than you did before. The body accelerates you, and you gain angular velocity. You end up in a lower, faster orbit. (assuming you don't actually hit the body). To move into a higher orbit, you speed up... you move further out, and slow down. Yes, you slow down to speed up, and you speed up to slow down. Probably, this is explained by converting linear into angular velocity, but again, I'm not too up on the actual math.
Two different orbits might be able to have the same linear velocity. It doesn't directly matter. For determining a stable orbit, only angular velocity counts.
Ok, so looking again at the original problem. We have an object directly behind the sun from the point of view of the Earth; the Sun is directly between the two bodies. Both bodies are orbiting. There are three possibilities:
A) The object is closer to the Sun than the Earth is. Because it is being accelerated more quickly, it must have more angular velocity to avoid being captured by the Sun. It cannot remain directly behind the Sun, and will eventually become visible.
B) The object is further away from the Sun than the Earth is. To avoid flying off into the deep dark, it have less angular velocity than the Earth. It, too, cannot stay in place, and will become visible.
C) The object is at exactly the same distance. This allows it to move at exactly the same speed the Earth moves; it can remain hidden as long as it can maintain that orbit. This is the ONLY scenario that will work, unless you assume a propulsion system of some type.
If, after all this, you still don't believe me, go find an online orrery... a model of the Solar System. Just watch the orbits for about three minutes and you will be convinced. Mercury moves VERY FAST. (in terms of angular velocity). Venus moves faster than Earth. Mars moves slower than Earth. You can directly calculate the orbital time by the distance from the Sun, though I don't have the formula handy. The farther out it is, the slower the stable orbit is.
It's entirely possible that all orbits of a given body have the same linear velocity, but I have no direct knowledge of that, and no way to easily prove it. In just thinking about it a minute or two... if that WAS true, it might apply only to perfectly circular orbits. Highly elliptical orbits are very fast at their near points and very slow at their far points. Perhaps the _average_ linear momentum is always the same?
Hopefully, someone with the math will chime in. I know this isn't very hard, and I'm a bit ashamed that I don't remember it anymore.
Very good explanation. I didn't realize my original wording was confusing... thanks for the clarification.
Ah, cool, I hadn't thought about that... the resyncs in RAID10 are faster too... another win.
:)
I knew the RAID5 stuff, but that wasn't really that relevant to a RAID0+1 vs. RAID10 comparison. "Slower but you lose less space" seemed like a pretty fair compromise for one sentence.
Note also that if you have a GOOD RAID5 controller, it'll work at pretty much the full speed of the spindles anyway. Controllers that good are often several grand, but they do exist. As an example, I have an old ICP Vortex 32-bit PCI controller. If I recall correctly, it benched writing about 60 megs/second, running RAID5 across six disks on two channels. The response time in normal usage is lightning-quick. It can take one hell of a beating.
Newer cards would be faster still, though you'll generally need better than vanilla PCI to support them.
Shouldn't this be in 'Politics', not "Hardware'?
I have an 8500-series 3Ware card, and it really doesn't perform well under load. If the array is under heavy write I/O, the entire machine drags to a near-halt. It's very frustrating. I ended up using the fairly expensive card as a JBOD controller, and using software RAID instead. On an Athlon 1900+, it's MUCH faster in software. I'd really prefer hardware RAID, but it's just too damn slow.
The 9XXX series are supposedly better, but reviews I've read suggest that they're still pretty underpowered for heavy writes.
Out of 8 disks, the chance of losing two at once is higher than you'd think, especially if he's using the cheaper SATA drives. I lost 2 drives out of a RAID5 in short succession just recently, and *just barely* managed to save the most recent data before the second drive died too.
RAID 0+1 is much inferior to RAID10. 0+1 is what the GP poster said... stripe 4 disks in RAID-0, and mirror those. You're no more fault tolerant than a RAID5 array.. if ANY two drives fail, you're hosed. You lose 50% of the space to boot. (in RAID5, on 8 disks, you'd lose only 12.5%, though of course it's slower.)
RAID10, on the other hand, is setting up four mirrors, and striping the mirrors. You still lose 50% of your space. However, you lose the whole array only if both 'sibling' drives in a given mirror fail. That means you have a pretty good chance of surviving a multi-drive failure. And it's very fast....just as fast as 0+1, but it's a lot more robust. Of course, both are very inefficient in terms of space lost, but drives are so cheap these days that it doesn't matter too much.
Any good controller will do RAID10 nowadays... only the very cheapest/crappiest controllers are limited to the inferior 0+1.
I'm almost sure that's wrong. Under the first sale doctrine, you have the right to sell the original CD you buy. Under fair use, you have the right to move your music from one medium to another for your own personal enjoyment.
Under copyright law, however, you do NOT have the right to transfer the copy. Whether the copy was legal when you made it or not is irrelevant. It is the transfer that is illegal. Only the copyright holder can authorize that.
You can sell the CD only because first sale overrides copyright, and only for that specific, original CD. If you backed up your CD, damaged it, and then recreated it from your backup, you would not have the right to transfer the backup. Only the original thing you bought can be resold.
IANAL. TINALO. YMMV.
50 concurrent users is a LOT. You may not really mean concurrent, as in "50 people actually reading from or writing to this drive at the same time". If you DO mean that, you desperately need SCSI, the fastest you can find. You'll need seek time more than anything else; the drives need to respond as fast as possible to multiplexed requests for data. Rotation speed, which improves seek time and transfer rate, is good too, but it's seek time that's most crucial in heavy multitasking environments. If by 'concurrent' you mean '50 people occasionally hitting the disk', then yeah, you could probably do SATA.
However, you already have SCSI. Management is used to paying for SCSI machines. If you have 50-100 people depending on something, and it's slow, that's a productivity drag. If you assume that all those people cost $100k/year each (not at all unreasonable with benefits), 50 people are getting paid about 2,500 bucks an hour, or about 20,000 dollars a day. In other words, if you speed them up by just 5% with better hardware, you're saving the company a thousand dollars a day. Even if it's a tiny 1% speed gain, that's still 200 bucks a day. Saving six grand a month for an upfront investment of ten grand is a total no brainer.
Buy SCSI.